Spotlight

Green Goddess

Since revealing her talent in Bertolucci's The Dreamers, Eva Green has become Hollywood's go-to enchantress, playing the Bond girl in last year's Casino Royale, and a 300-year-old witch in this winter's fantasy event The Golden Compass. Catching up with the French siren in Paris as she launches Christian Dior's new scent, Midnight Poison, VF.com learns of her love for dressing up—and down.

As midnight approaches at the Palais Garnier opera house, in Paris, a grand production is just getting underway. The sweeping marble stairway of the ornate cultural landmark is lined with dozens of handsome young factota dressed in black, and a director rushes around barking out urgent instructions into his walkie-talkie. Well-heeled guests are ushered upstairs to the mezzanine level, which has been tricked out with acres of fake foliage; the sound of Garden of Eden chirruping is being piped in to set the ambience.

This little soirée is being staged by Parfums Christian Dior to "celebrate the birth of a fragrance." The program begins with the screening of a commercial for Dior's new scent, Midnight Poison, directed by Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-Wai. The lavishly budgeted spot features Paris-born actress Eva Green floating through some kind of futuristic fairy-tale fantasy looking suitably ethereal in a billowing blue gown. The commercial is visually stunning, and makes about as much sense as most Wong Kar-Wai movies.

The 150 guests file into the grand hall of the opera house, and take their places at a long dining table where they tackle tricky hors d'oeuvres as a relentlessly morose soundtrack echoes around the high ceilings. The event's M.C., with the kind of humorless gravitas that only the French can muster, announces the arrival of Mademoiselle Green, "a fascinating and free-spirited actress." At the far end of the room, Green and Dior designer in chief John Galliano materialize inside some kind of giant snow globe. They emerge together and glide down to their positions at the head of the table.

The day after the event, Eva Green looks back at her big night at l'Opéra and agrees that "it was completely mad. In a good way, though! It's glamour—I actually found it quite intimate; there were no cameras there."

The 27-year-old Green is quite unabashed about lending her name to a scent—not for all the standard young-actress blather about artistic integrity and so forth. To Green, the whole idea of "keeping it real" is of no interest whatsoever.

"I love photo shoots where I can be like a pinup, not myself," Green gushes. "Where I can be feminine, glamorous, dark … not like in real life. I hate it when you go in and they want you to be 'natural,' to be yourself. I just hate it. I love having fun. When they ask you to smile, I hate it. Of course I smile in my real life, but to do it on cue, that's not spontaneous. I'd rather do something that's like a little movie, like a little story, rather than just me—I feel naked."

See more of Patrick Demarchelier's photos of Eva Green.

This last sentiment is more than a little ironic given the nature of Green's big-screen debut in Bernardo Bertolucci's 2003 kink-fest, The Dreamers. In the film, set against the backdrop of the 1968 student revolts in Paris, Green—whose character was involved in an ill-fated ménage à trois that included her brother—had many scenes that did not require her to visit the wardrobe department. Although the film itself was somewhat of a disappointment, reviewers tended to agree that Eva Green is indeed a fascinating and free-spirited actress.

Neither Green's agent nor her mother, the former actress Marlène Jobert, wanted her to do The Dreamers—not just because of the extensive nudity required, but because of the career vortex that swallowed up Maria Schneider, the young actress who starred in explicit sex scenes in Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris. Green herself had no doubts about taking on the Dreamers role, "because I'm such a big fan of Bertolucci." She points out that the Italian director is "not a pervert" (the point is re-stated later, just in case) and says that her fellow actors helped her get comfortable with on-set nudity. "We were, like, five years old," she says. "It was very innocent."

Eva Green speaks with the rounded vowels and slightly deracinated politesse of a news anchor on some generic European satellite channel. Although she was raised in Paris, Green went to an English-speaking school, and spent a good part of her teenage life in Britain and Ireland, as well as a short spell in the unglamorous location of Smithtown, Long Island. "It was great," she says. "All the boys were so cool, with their hair and their music, driving cars when they were 16! I felt like I was in Saved by the Bell."

For most of her time in high school, Green would have been horrified by the very idea of performing in front of people, but she overcame her inhibitions and enrolled at a respected acting school in Paris. "I'm still shy," Green insists. "Less shy now—when I was in school I'd pass out if the teacher asked me a question in class. It's very paradoxical; you're so scared that it feels like you just have to go and do it. There's something weird going on—I get this strange kind of focus. Like being on drugs."

Just in case you start getting the impression that Eva Green is that kind of fascinating and free-spirited actress, it should be pointed out that she lives a rather sedate life in Primrose Hill, a cloistered and verdant part of north London. She bought an apartment there, near a park where she goes to walk her Border terrier, Griffin, and occasionally to jog. Her mother visits often from Paris. Green says she never goes to nightclubs, preferring instead to "chill out" at home to a bit of Mahler, or kick back with a Haruki Murakami book. She tends not to get recognized around London, she says: "I look like a geek, a teenager. I'm not Angelina Jolie."

Eva Green once again ignored her professional advisers when she signed up for last year's Bond movie, Casino Royale, in the fate-tempting role of the new Bond girl. Historically the ladies who play these parts do not go on to distinguished careers, but Green—a last-minute choice for the film's producers—nonetheless took on the part of Vesper Lynd, Bond's tightly wrapped sidekick from the British Treasury.

During filming, director Martin Campbell suddenly decided that one of the movie's scenes would work better if Green shed her clothes and took a shower. She strongly resisted the idea, and with the backup of her co-star Daniel Craig, she talked the director out of the idea. "I'm a control freak," admits Green. "Which is good in some ways. If it's not right I'll talk to the director—I just want everything to be perfect. It's embarrassing, because I feel like I'm crossing the line. But it's good to try."

Despite the obvious benefits of doing a smash-hit blockbuster, parts of the experience did not sit too well with Green, who sometimes finds herself hankering for the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 40s. "Back then the studios built an image for you," she says. "It was more controlled. For the Bond movie you had to do interviews for shitty magazines, and they ask you all these personal questions. I don't really understand why. I don't like it—it kills the dream." Just in case she's starting to sound too unworldly, Green confesses: "When I get on a plane I buy Hello! and Heat magazine. If you're not in it, it's good."

Overall, Green has emerged from the "Bond machine" relatively unscathed. "It's a good curse for the moment," she says. "I can get a good table at restaurants—that's the best bit." In acting terms, however, Green knows that she has yet to really arrive. "I still have to prove a lot. I know that," she adds.

It would be easier for Eva Green to prove herself if she were being offered movie roles that went a little deeper than the "beautiful woman with dark hair." When the actress goes to Hollywood for business meetings, she says, "people always say, 'I love your movie!' 'Which one?' Of course they mean the Bond movie… I don't receive many interesting scripts. They go to the hottest people. Or if I'm interested in something it doesn't come to me."

It turns out that this particular "beautiful woman with dark hair" is in fact a natural blonde who only went brunette in her teens. Green will get a chance to show both colors in her next movie, the dystopian indie thriller Franklyn, which will see her playing an edgy artist type with a split personality and a propensity for slumming. In preparation for the role, Green wrote and directed short performance-art films that appear in the larger film—and resumed her former habit of chain-smoking American Spirits. "It's stressful and very exciting," she says. "It sounds quite mad—the character is dressed like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and she's talking to her own reflection. At the end she does a suicide attempt. It's quite challenging—I don't want to look ridiculous."

See more of Patrick Demarchelier's photos of Eva Green.

The stakes will be even higher this December, when Green stars in a fantasy bigger than anything even the house of Dior could mount. The Golden Compass is a hugely ambitious adaptation of the first book in Philip Pullman's globally popular fantasy trilogy "His Dark Materials"; the film's financial performance is of critical importance to New Line Cinema, given its gargantuan $180-million-plus budget. (New Line made the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy for a rumored $280 million.) Eva Green herself will not be directly in the line of fire, since her role as the benevolent witch (and beautiful woman with dark hair), Serafina Pekkala, doesn't really take off until the second book.

The film reunited Green, albeit fleetingly, with her Casino Royale co-star Daniel Craig and gave her the chance to work with Nicole Kidman. For the eminently sensible Mademoiselle Green, meeting the former Mrs. Cruise sent her back into self-deprecation mode. "I was very impressed—she's so tall and beautiful!" says Green. "I felt like I was 12 years old…"